Hard Drive File I/O Help

This is a discussion on Hard Drive File I/O Help within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; I'm pretty ignorant about many computer hardware topics. I've been banging my head against this for a couple of days, ...

Hard Drive File I/O Help

I'm pretty ignorant about many computer hardware topics. I've been banging my head against this for a couple of days, and then I figured I should ask people who might be able to help.

At a previous place of employment, I wrote a program that read from a file cache holding a large data object (2-4 GB). The program was multi-threaded and so would read from different locations in this cache at different times. The file I/O was very non-sequential. In running the program on my development machine, the bottleneck was the file I/O due to the threads competing over the physical location of the hard drive head.

The program was deployed on a server machine, and the file I/O problem suddenly disappeared. The server had only a single hard drive, so it wasn't using RAID. The hard drive was not a SSD. I'm looking to purchase a server machine with this same characteristic, but I don't know what could have been responsible for this behavior. Any suggestions?

If I did your homework for you, then you might pass your class without learning how to write a program like this. Then you might graduate and get your degree without learning how to write a program like this. You might become a professional programmer without knowing how to write a program like this. Someday you might work on a project with me without knowing how to write a program like this. Then I would have to do you serious bodily harm. - Jack Klein

If I did your homework for you, then you might pass your class without learning how to write a program like this. Then you might graduate and get your degree without learning how to write a program like this. You might become a professional programmer without knowing how to write a program like this. Someday you might work on a project with me without knowing how to write a program like this. Then I would have to do you serious bodily harm. - Jack Klein